When we started building the visual album section in early 2022, we thought it would take about three months. We had a rough definition — a sustained visual work tied to a record, meant to be experienced as a whole — and a list of maybe 60 works we were confident belonged in the category. We had the technical infrastructure from the main catalog, which we thought we could largely reuse. We had two people with good taste and clear opinions.
Twenty-seven months and about 800 entries later, I can tell you that almost every assumption we started with was wrong, and most of the interesting problems were ones we hadn't anticipated.
The definition problem
The original definition — "a sustained visual work tied to a record, intended to be experienced as a whole" — sounded reasonable. In practice, every word in it turned out to require a separate decision.
Sustained: What's the minimum length? A collection of individual videos for each track on an album, released simultaneously and clearly meant to be watched in sequence, is that a visual album? We decided yes, if the director conceived them as a unit. This opened up a large category of work from the early 2010s that had previously felt like a grey area.
Tied to a record: What about visual works released ahead of a record to set the aesthetic? Prince's Sign "☮" the Times concert film was released simultaneously with the record but functions differently from something like Beyoncé's Lemonade, which was released as a simultaneous single object. We kept both. What about works released long after the album — like the visual companion to Flying Lotus's You're Dead!, which came years after the record? We kept that too.
Intended to be experienced as a whole: This is the hardest one. Intent is difficult to establish. We settled on a proxy: if the director or artist described it as a visual album in interviews, press materials, or direct communication with us, that counted. If they didn't, we looked for structural evidence — a through-line, a consistent visual grammar, narrative continuity. About sixty works in the archive are marked "classification disputed" because the evidence genuinely cuts both ways.
The international distribution problem
About a third of the works in the visual album section were released primarily in markets outside Europe and North America. This matters because our initial research infrastructure — which publication archives we searched, which industry contacts we had, which language we could read — was heavily biased toward English-language material.
We caught this early enough to do something about it. Over the course of 2022 and 2023, we brought on six volunteer contributors with language and regional expertise: two for Japanese and Korean language material, one for Portuguese-language Brazilian market, one for Spanish-language Latin American material, one for French-language African markets, and one who had done research specifically on the Nairobi music scene from 2000–2010. Their contributions shifted the archive significantly. About 180 entries in the visual album section wouldn't exist without them.
What surprised us
The most useful thing that came out of the project wasn't something we planned: the archive became a research resource for people studying the form academically. We knew this was possible in the abstract — we'd talked about it when we were planning the section. What we didn't expect was how quickly it happened, or how specifically researchers would use it.
The first time we noticed was in late 2022, when a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam emailed to ask about our methodology for classifying disputed works. She was writing a dissertation on the visual album as a category and found that our classification disputes were useful as a set of test cases. She cited the archive in her thesis. Her supervisor cited it in a journal article the following year.
This led to a change in how we document our decisions. We started writing short methodology notes for each classification dispute, explaining what evidence we considered and why we landed where we did. These notes are visible to members. They're not always interesting, but occasionally they are — especially for works where the director and the artist have publicly disagreed about how the work should be categorized.
What's still missing
We have significant gaps in 1990s material, especially from artists on independent labels who didn't have the distribution infrastructure to get their visual work into archives. If you're reading this and have material or knowledge that might help — get in touch at hello@spectavid.xyz. We're particularly interested in UK indie and alternative material from 1993–1999, which is underrepresented in ways that don't reflect what was actually being made.